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J. B. Kripalani

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Jivatram Kripalani

Patel, Azad, Jivatram Kripalani and other Congressmen at Wardha.

Acharya (scholar) Jivatram Bhagwandas Kripalani (1888-1982) was an Indian politician, noted particularly for holding the presidency of the Indian National Congress during the transfer of power in 1947.

He grew close to Gandhi and became in time one of his most ardent disciples. Kripalani was a familiar figure to generations of dissenters, from the Non-Cooperation Movements of the 1920s through till the Emergency of the 1970s.

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orn in Hyderabad,Sindh in 1888. He was of Sindhi and Gujarati roots. At one time, he was expelled from D.J.Science College,Karachi for his political activities.Following his education at Fergusson College in Bombay, he worked as a schoolteacher before joining the freedom movement in the wake of Gandhi's return from South Africa.

Kripalani was involved in the Non-Cooperation Movement of the early 1920s. He worked in Gandhi's ashrams in Gujarat and Maharashtra on tasks of social reform and education, and later left for Bihar and the United Provinces in northern India to teach and organize new ashrams. He courted arrest on numerous occasions during the Civil Disobedience movements and smaller occasions of organizing protests and publishing seditious material against the British raj.

Congress leader

Kripalani joined the All India Congress Committee, and became its General Secretary in 1928-29.

Kripalani was prominently involved over a decade in top Congress party affairs, and in the organization of the Salt Satyagraha and the Quit India Movement. Kripalani served in the interim government of India (1946-1947) and the Constituent Assembly of India.

As Congress President and the election of 1950

In spite of being ideologically at odds with both the right-wing Vallabhbhai Patel and the left-wing Jawaharlal Nehru - he was elected Congress President for the crucial years around Indian independence in 1947. After Gandhi's assassination in January 1948, Nehru rejected his demand that the party's views should be sought in all decisions. Nehru, with the support of Patel, told Kripalani that while the party was entitled to lay down the broad principles and guidelines, it could not be granted a say in the government's day-to-day affairs. This precedent became central to the relationship between government and ruling party in subsequent decades.

Nehru, however, supported Kripalani in the election of the Congress President in 1950. The election was considered a vital battle for the party between the left, led by Nehru, and the right, led by Patel. Kripalani went up against Patel's candidate, the Hindu nationalist Purushottam Das Tandon. In an atmosphere soured by communal tension, the controversial reconstruction of the Somnath Temple, the founding of the Jan Sangh, and the Nehru-Liaquat Pact, as well as differences on economic policy, Tandon narrowly defeated Kripalani.

Bruised by his defeat, and disillusioned by what he viewed as the abandonment of the Gandhian ideal of a countless village republics, Kripalani left the Congress and became one of the founders of the Kisan Mazdoor Praja Party. This party subsequently merged with the Socialist Party of India to form the Praja Socialist Party.

For a while it was even believed that Nehru, stung by the defeat, was considering abandoning the Congress as well; his several offers of resignation at the time were all, however, shouted down.[citation needed] A great many of the more progressive elements of the party left in the months following the election, however. Congress's subsequent bias to the right was only balanced when Nehru obtained the resignation of Tandon in the run up to the general elections of 1951.

In the Socialist Party

Kripalani remained in opposition for the rest of his life. His wife since 1938, Sucheta Kripalani, went from strength to strength in the Congress Party, with several Central ministries; she was also the first female Chief Minister, in Uttar Pradesh. The Kripalanis were frequently at loggerheads in Parliament.

One matter they agreed on was the undesirability of vast parts of the Hindu Marriage Act, particularly the controversial 'Restitution of Conjugal Rights' clause. By this clause a partner who had survived an unsuccessful filing for divorce could move the courts to return to the status quo ante in terms of conjugal interaction. Kripalani, horrified, made one of his most memorable speeches, saying "this provision is physically undesirable, morally unwanted and aesthetically disgusting."[citation needed]

Kripalani was also concerned with the privilege of parliament over the press. During Nehru's premiership, the Lok Sabha called the Chief Editor of the weekly Blitz, the well-known Russi Karanjia to the bar and admonished him for "denigration and defamation of a Member of Parliament". This was despite Karanjia' closeness to, and Kripalani's estrangement from, Nehru.

Kripalani moved the first-ever No confidence motion on the floor of the Lok Sabha in August 1963, immediately after the disastrous India-China War.

Later life

Kripalani remained a critic of Nehru's policies and administration, while working for social and environmental causes.

While remaining active in electoral politics, Kripalani gradually became more of a spiritual leader of the socialists than anything else; in particular, he was generally considered to be, along with Vinoba Bhave, the leader of the what remained of the Gandhian faction. He was active, along with Bhave, in preservation and conservation activities throughout the 1970s.

In 1972-3, he agitated against the increasingly authoritarian rule of Nehru's daughter Indira Gandhi, then Prime Minister of India. Kripalani and Jayaprakash Narayan felt that Gandhi's rule had become dictatorial and anti-democratic. Her conviction on charges of using government machinery for her election campaign galvanized her political opposition and public disenchantment against her policies. Along with Narayan and Lohia, Kripalani toured the country urging non-violent protest and civil disobedience. When the Emergency was declared as a result of the vocal dissent he helped stir up, the octogenarian Kripalani was among the first of the Opposition leaders to be arrested on the night of 26 June 1975. He lived long enough to survive the Emergency and see the first non-Congress government since Independence following the Bharatiya Janata Party victory in the 1977 polls.

He died on March 19, 1982, at the age of 94.

In the 1982 film Gandhi by Richard Attenborough, J.B. Kripalani was played by Indian actor Anang Desai.